brainrow

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was on The Charlie Rose Show not long ago, talking about Team of Rivals, her book about Abraham Lincoln.

She repeated a story from her book. Only a little more than forty years after Lincoln’s death, Leo Tolstoy found that Lincoln’s fame had spread to one of the remotest places on earth.

From the book:

In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucusus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains.” Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock…. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”

“I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth … his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength.” When he finished, they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful Arabian horse.” The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.”

Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not such a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.

“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country — bigger than all the Presidents together.

“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”

I’ve just finished reading Al Franken’s new book, The Truth (with Jokes).

It’s better, I think, than his previous book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and that book was pretty good.

Franken is not a reporter. He’s not uncovering new Republican scandals. Rather, he takes stories that have already been reported and puts them together very effectively to show the depth of hypocrisy, incompetence, and malice of the Bush administration and its apologists in Congress. Despite the jokes mentioned in the title, it’s a serious book. The jokes aren’t laugh-out-loud funny (although I did laugh out loud a couple times). Mostly they serve as a sort of safety valve. Without them, many readers might collapse sobbing after learning just how bad Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, DeLay, Frist and their ilk really are.

From a chapter about the Iraq war, Franken summarizes:

Let’s face it. You can’t count on them to give you straight information. You can’t count on them to tell us straight why we’re going to war. You can’t count on them to tell us what’s happening over there.

You can’t count on them to do their homework. To keep track of our money. You can’t count on them to punish war profiteers. You can’t count on them to protect our troops.

You can’t rely on them for much of anything. Armor. Veterans’ benefits. You can’t count on them for the true story of how Jessica Lynch was captured, or how Pat Tillman died. Even for how the “Mission Accomplished” sign went up on the USS Abraham Lincoln. They actually lied about that.

You can’t count on them to count terrorist attacks. You can’t count on them to count civilian victims. You can’t count on them to listen to military commanders and send in enough troops, or not to lie about the commanders asking them to send more troops, or to listen to Colin Powell and not torture people, or to not lie about whether the torture policies started at the top.

You can’t trust them to care. About Iraqis. About Americans.

You can’t trust them to do the work of actually signing killed-in-action letters. You can’t trust them not to lie about not signing killed-in-action letters.

You can’t count on them to acknowledge any mistakes whatsoever. You can’t trust them not to lie when confronted with those mistakes.

You can’t trust them not to believe their own propaganda.

You can’t trust them. Period.

…

If you want to know what I think we should do in Iraq, it’s that we should think about what we have to do in America. We have to throw these guys out.

If you remember the story of Bill O’Reilly’s Peabody awards from Al Franken’s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, it will come as no surprise to you that
Bill O’Reilly makes stuff up:

Media Matters has repeatedly debunked O’Reilly’s false claims of success regarding a French boycott. On April 27, 2004, he asserted that the boycott had cost France “billions of dollars,” citing the “Paris Business Review” as a source, but Media Matters documented that Census figures actually showed an increase in U.S. imports from France; additionally, there is no evidence of a publication named the “Paris Business Review.”

(Franken’s celebrated BookExpo run-in with O’Reilly is supposedly online here. It appears to be in RealMedia format. I can’t run it myself, because I don’t use RealPlayer.)

After I retired last year, I borrowed and read the first four Harry Potter books. Before I’d finished reading the fourth book, I ordered the fifth from Amazon.com, and waited impatiently until it arrived.

If you dismiss the Harry Potter books as children’s literature, or if you know Harry Potter only from the movies, you’re cheating yourself of something wonderful.

The sixth book is due on July 16. I’ve had my copy on order for some time now. In anticipation, I’ve been re-reading the first five books.

Recently much was made of parallels between the plot of the latest Star Wars movie and political current events. The movie was considered critical of aspects of the Bush Administration. Director George Lucas denied that the movie was about Bush or the War in Iraq:

Lucas said that a long time ago in a galaxy far away, he had read some history and wondered why, after going to the trouble of killing Caesar, the Roman Senate turned things over to his equally power-hungry nephew, Augustus Caesar? Or that after a revolution, France turned next to Napoleon, a dictator?

That’s what fueled the entire Star Wars saga, Lucas said. “It seems to happen the same way every time: There are threats, and a democratic body, the Senate, is not able to function properly.”

So I was interested, when reading Harry Potter books published before George W. Bush became president, to see parallels to current events every bit as strong as those in the latest Star Wars movie.

For example: Dumbledore, a very good wizard, objects to the practice, at a wizard prison called Azkaban, of using dementors as guards. Dementors are cruel magical creatures that torment the souls of anyone in their power. The Minister of Magic dismisses Dumbledore’s objections as “preposterous,” and adds, “Half of us only feel safe in our beds at night because we know the dementors are standing guard at Azkaban!”

In the books, there are good wizards and evil ones, who practice Dark Magic. Aurors are wizards specially trained to fight against Dark Magic. Voldemort, the worst of the Dark Wizards, led a reign of terror years before, then he mysteriously lost his powers and vanished. Most people in the magical world still fear even to speak his name. Many good wizards believe Voldemort is still alive, waiting to strike again.

The teenaged student wizards, including Harry, notice a certain mistrust between some of the adult foes of the Dark Side. One of their adult friends is talking about a senior official in the Ministry of Magic whom I’ll call John Smith, to avoid giving away too much of the story:

“He’s a great wizard, John Smith, powerful, magical — and power-hungry. Oh never a Voldemort supporter,” he said, reading the look on Harry’s face. “No, John Smith was always very outspoken against the Dark Side. But then a lot of people who were against the Dark Side… well, you wouldn’t understand… you’re too young….”

The teenagers complain, saying, “Try us, why don’t you?” So their friend takes them back to the peak of Voldemort’s power:

“You don’t know who his supporters are, you don’t know who’s working for him and who isn’t; you know he can control people so that they do terrible things without being able to stop themselves. You’re scared for yourself, and your family, and your friends. Every week, news comes of more deaths, more disappearances, more torturing…”

He continues:

“Well, times like that bring out the best in some people and the worst in others. Smith’s principles might’ve been good in the beginning — I wouldn’t know. He rose quickly through the Ministry, and he started ordering very harsh measures against Voldemort’s supporters. The Aurors were given new powers — powers to kill rather than capture, for instance. [Some suspects were] handed straight to the dementors without trial. Smith fought violence with violence[…] I would say he became as ruthless and cruel as many on the Dark Side. He had his supporters, mind you — plenty of people thought he was going about things the right way…”

Gosh, that sounds familiar.

The New York Times Book Review on the unending hatred for Bill Clinton:

Millions of Americans despise Bill Clinton. They have done so since he became a presence in national politics in the early 1990’s, and they continue to do so today, more than four years after his retirement from public office.

The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics. It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office. It is almost entirely personal. In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush. It surpasses even the liberals’ longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon. The only political obsession comparable to it in the past century is the hatred that a significant minority of Americans felt for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In this respect the phenomenon is all the more puzzling. Roosevelt made enormous and sometimes reckless changes in the American government and economy, and when his critics loathed him for it, he loathed them back. “They are unanimous in their hate for me” he said of them in his 1936 re-election campaign, “and I welcome their hatred.” Clinton, on the other hand, was a centrist who undertook no dramatic transformations of society or government and, what was more, showed himself to be an instinctive conciliator who believed in compromise almost to a fault.

Viewed in historical perspective, Clinton-hatred is not easy to explain. Certainly the Monica Lewinsky affair does not explain it. The people who detested the president after that dalliance became public were essentially the same ones who had detested him in 1992. They merely grew louder.

There is, of course, a simpler argument that some Clinton haters use to explain the persistence of their passion. They say that he was, to put it bluntly, a very bad president — immature, self-absorbed, indecisive in domestic affairs and disastrously weak when it came to representing America in the affairs of the world.

It is this argument that John F. Harris utterly demolishes in “The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House,” his thorough, readable and scrupulously honest account of the Clinton years. Harris, who was The Washington Post’s White House correspondent from 1995 through 2000, is no Clinton apologist. His portraits of the decision-making process he witnessed reveal a president who indeed lacked discipline in his daily routine; examined and re-examined policy choices endlessly, to the frustration of his advisers; and was fearful about the use of military force abroad, even in behalf of the most defensible causes.

But over the course of 500 pages, Harris also documents the history of a president who, however frustrating he may have been in style and method, usually made the right choices in the end — even when he felt that he was hurting himself politically. The 1993 spending cuts and tax increases, over which he agonized for months, ultimately reduced the federal deficit, reassured financial markets and set in motion the prosperity that marked the second half of the decade. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which Clinton signed against the advice of his closest Democratic allies, turned out to be the most successful domestic policy initiative of the 1990’s.

Thirty-five years ago this evening, a spherical oxygen tank in the Apollo 13 spacecraft exploded, with a loud bang that rocked the spacecraft.

Flight controllers on the ground didn’t hear the bang, but they noticed sudden changes in numbers displayed on the computer terminals where they monitored the many systems that made up the spacecraft.

The controllers talk to each other with headsets wired into a communications channel called the loop. Many of the controllers are listening to two loops: the main flight controller loop, and a second loop connecting specialists in a particular mission sub-system. Thirty-five years ago tonight, the real action was on the EECOM loop, where the experts monitoring the environmental and electrical systems of the spacecraft’s command and service modules worked to understand the most serious problem America had yet faced in space.

Astronaut Swigert: Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.

Unidentified voice #1: What’s the matter with the data, EECOM?

Unidentified voice #2: We’ve got more than a problem.

EECOM: Okay, listen, listen, you guys. We’ve lost fuel cell one and two pressure.

Unidentified voice #2: We lost O₂ tank two pressure. And temperature.

Astronaut Lovell: Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem.

EECOM: Okay.

Unidentified voice #2: Standby, they’ve got a problem.

Astronaut Lovell: Main B bus undervolt.

Capcom: Roger, main B undervolt.

Later, EECOM Sy Liebergot realized, with dread, exactly what had happened:

Unidentified voice #3: I want to psych out what those fuel cells are doing here. We might have a pressure problem in the fuel cells, it looks like.

EECOM: Yeah, I see the N₂…

Unidentified voice #3: Two fuel cells simultaneously.

EECOM: That can’t be.

Unidentified voice #3: I can’t believe that, right off the bat, but — but they’re not feeding current.

EECOM: Yeah, if you believe that N₂ pressure, we blew a sphere.

Apollo 13’s lunar landing mission was doomed from the moment the oxygen tank exploded. Through the heroic efforts of the astronauts and the ground crew, the three astronauts were returned safely to earth.

For years, NASA considered the Apollo 13 mission a failure, and tried to sweep it under the rug. It took years to understand that Apollo 13 was not a failure. It was the most severe test imaginable of the people and the processes of the Apollo program; they passed the test. The other Apollo missions were engineering triumphs. Apollo 13 was more than that. The safe splashdown of the Apollo 13 command module was the greatest moment of the entire Apollo program.

Years later, Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell wrote a book about the experience, called Lost Moon. Hollywood turned the book into the blockbuster movie Apollo 13, and Lovell’s book was renamed Apollo 13 to take advantage of the publicity. The book is well worth reading. (The movie is entertaining, but overly melodramatic.)

The best book about Apollo 13 is 13: The Flight That Failed, by Henry S. F. Cooper. I think I’ve read it five times. It’s never taken me much more than a day to read it, because I just can’t put it down once I start reading. If you have any interest in the Apollo program, Cooper’s book is the best place to start reading.